A good journalistic rule of thumb is not to pick on cripples or old ladies or, if you can help it, crippled old ladies. But the uncompassionately conservative SCRAPBOOK is going to make an exception for Doris Haddock, aka Granny D, the self-described "old New Hampshire woman with arthritis and emphysema and parched lips and a splintered hat." Readers will recall her as the 91-year-old publicity-hound great grandmother who spent 14 months hiking 3,200 miles across America to highlight the need for campaign finance reform. (She would have made better time had she not kept peeling off to accept awards and speaking gigs at Reform party conventions.)
During Campaign 2000, we had occasion to meet Granny D several times, and were impressed by her ready wit, smart tailoring (fluorescent crossing-guard jacket, even indoors), and Katharine Hepburn-ish dramatics that made every speech sound like a community-theater reading of Our Town. With her trek completed, though, THE SCRAPBOOK was hoping we'd seen the last of Granny D's self-congratulatory 45-minute harangues about money being the root of all evil in politics (we like to think Bob Shrum is).
But no. Just in time for Senate debate on the McCain-Feingold bill, we receive an advance copy of Granny D's song-of-herself memoir, Walking Across America In My 90th Year, which she'll promote on a two-week campaign-finance-reform walk around the U.S. Capitol building (THE SCRAPBOOK can circle the grounds in 25 minutes, but then, we don't have a book to promote). Despite being a tad overwrought -- people she meets during her odyssey are said to break down in tears when discussing soft-money excesses -- the book is not without entertainment value, particularly when Granny D discusses her runaway libido. One of her chapters is entitled "A Man Magnet." In another, she visits a Midland bull riding ring where the cowboys "were very young men, strutting about in tight blue jeans, with colorful cowboy shirts tucked in over their trim bellies." Our favorite anecdote comes when she meets Connecticut congressman Christopher Shays. As an ice-breaker, Shays kneels down to kiss her hand, while Granny leans forward to kiss "the bald spot on the top of his head."
It's enough to call for a journalistic cold shower, which is provided by Bill Moyers's foreword. Who better to kick off a memoir celebrating high-fiber sanctimony than PBS's own Narcissus? Barry Goldwater once said of Moyers, "Every time I see him, I get sick to my stomach and want to throw up." (Goldwater had been on the receiving end of what author Rick Perlstein calls the anti-Goldwater "espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit" Moyers ran for LBJ.) Moyers would have Goldwater reaching for the Pepcid as he lovingly recounts Granny D facing down Mitch McConnell ("the most ardent apologist for legalized bribery in the United States Senate"), or how Granny D declared, during a march down Lobbyist Row, "Our brooms are ballots, and we come a-sweeping."
In fact, Goldwater wouldn't have had to read further than Moyers's first sentence before the onset of nausea. You know you are in trouble when the man who praised Al Gore's Earth in the Balance as "a powerful summons for the politics of life and hope" warns us that "The soul of a citizen shines through these pages." There are other arguments against the McCain-Feingold bill, but thwarting the likes of Bill Moyers and Granny D may be the best.